Cantor is the House Majority Leader, which means that he is
responsible for the mundane business of managing the schedule, the House
floor, and committees, where legislation is generally written. He has
used his position to transform himself into the Party’s chief political
strategist. Cantor is frequently talked about as a future Speaker; he
could even be a future President, some of his aides say. Since the
election, as Republicans have confronted Obama in a series of budgetary
battles—another will unfold this week—few have tried as hard as Cantor
to reposition and redefine the defeated party.

“He’s a fantastic
Majority Leader,” Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee
and a close friend, said. “Eric keeps the trains running on time very
efficiently.” As Mitt Romney’s former running mate and the architect of
the budget policies that some Republicans blame for their loss in 2012,
Ryan is well aware of his party’s problems. “What Eric is really
focussed on is that we need to do a better job of broadening our appeal
and showing that we have real ideas and solutions that make people’s
lives better,” Ryan said. “Eric is the guy who studies the big vision
and is doing the step-by-step, daily management of the process to get us
there. That is a huge job.”

To recap, the losing VP candidate thinks Cantor is "fantastic". That's all you need to know about the House GOP over the next 2 years, more likely 4, as they will continue doing what they are doing now, only worse and more of it.

Cantor was one of the most influential political forces in Obama’s
first term. In June of 2011, the President and the Speaker began working
toward a Grand Bargain of major tax increases and spending cuts to
address the government’s long-term budget deficits. Until late June,
Boehner had managed to keep these talks secret from Cantor. On July
21st, Boehner paused in his discussions with Obama to talk to Cantor and
outline the proposed deal. As Obama waited by the phone for a response
from the Speaker, Cantor struck. Cantor told me that it was a “fair
assessment” that he talked Boehner out of accepting Obama’s deal. He
said he told Boehner that it would be better, instead, to take the
issues of taxes and spending to the voters and “have it out” with the
Democrats in the election. Why give Obama an enormous political victory,
and potentially help him win reëlection, when they might be able to
negotiate a more favorable deal with a new Republican President? Boehner
told Obama there was no deal. Instead of a Grand Bargain, Cantor and
the House Republicans made a grand bet.

The bet failed
spectacularly. Just as Cantor had urged, Obama and Romney spent much of
the campaign debating tax and spending policies that the House
Republicans had foisted on the Romney-Ryan ticket. What’s more, by
scuttling the 2011 Grand Bargain negotiations, Cantor, more than any
other politician, helped create the series of fiscal crises that have
gripped Washington since Election Day. The failure of the Grand Bargain
led to a byzantine deal: if the two parties could not agree on a new
deficit plan, then a combination of tax increases and spending cuts—cuts
known, in budget jargon, as a “sequester”—would automatically kick in
on New Year’s Day. (The sequester was postponed until March 1st.)
Looming beyond this “fiscal cliff” was an even more perilous fight, over
the expiration of the debt ceiling, which is the limit on how much
money the government can borrow, and which Congress must regularly raise
if the Treasury is to pay its bills.

Lizza is correct here. The mess we're in now is a direct result of Cantor's politically terminal case of Obama Derangement Syndrome. Four years of manufactured crises designed to destroy the Democratic president backfired, so now those who voted for him must be punished by another four years of crises.

It really is negotiation with terrorists, and always has been. And the man behind this tactic has been Cantor, not Boehner, from the beginning.

4 comments:

“He’s a fantastic Majority Leader,” Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and a close friend, said. “Eric keeps the trains running on time very efficiently.” Mussolini was said to have made the trains run on time as well. Perhaps a fact check is in order: http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp

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With Republicans controlling the House and Senate and President Obama coming to the end of his second term in the White House, there's still plenty of Stupid to fight on all sides with a crumbling global economy imperiling the world, two seemingly endless wars, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.

Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there still coming from both political parties, when we need solutions.

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